Air and missile defense radar systems provide early warning as to both battlefield and theater threats. A well designed air and missile defense radar system provides sufficient advance warning for ground personnel to take evasive actions, interceptor aircraft or missile assets can be vectored towards the threat, or electronic jamming devices employed. Owing to the effectiveness of air and missile defense radar systems against an aggressor, conventional air attack doctrine includes an anti-radiation missile (ARM) attack component to blind a defender as to an airborne threat and create air and/or missile attack corridors. Even in instances where a defender retains air superiority, the threat of ARM attack persists owing to growing prevalence of mobile ground fired ARM and drones deploying ARMs.
A problem with defending an air and missile radar defense system against a potential threat is the complexity of the problem. To model a radar defense system and its perceived performance against an ARM threat involves approximately 200 interdependent variables resulting in a stochastic computation that is so complex that to analyze all the valid combinations involves millions of computational runs. As a result, even with high speed computational resources, radar system operational optimization in the face of an evolving threat is currently so slow as to effectively be intractable. Genetic algorithms have been shown effective in optimizing peak to side lobe ratio radar ambiguity functions. T. Bucciarelli et al., Proceedings of the 8th Intl. Conf. on Signal Processing Applns and Tech., Miller Freeman, Vol. 2, pages 1862-1866 (1997). Genetic analysis has also been used in the identification and design of optimal teams of sensors to detect enemy radars using genetic analysis. Yilmaz et al., “Evolving Sensor Suites for Enemy Radar Detection”. However, these past efforts have not addressed issues related to improving radar defense system survivability against ARMs.
Currently, radar emitting beacon decoys are used to enhance radar survivability by presenting radar signal clutter to deceive an ARM. Typically, a decoy emits operational radar-like signals, so as to distract or confuse an ARM. However, the geometric configuration of a decoy or group of decoys in a radar system is complex. Likewise, the operational conditions of a radar and the related decoys to blunt a given ARM threat is a complex problem that may evolve in real time based on the threat scenario.
Thus, there exists a need to enhance configurational and operational parameters of a defense radar system against an ARM threat. There further exists a need to calculate configurational and operational parameters in an efficient way with resort to genetic analysis to maximize a fitness function for a given set of configurational and operational parameters using a survival of the fittest approach. Genetic algorithms are not known to have previously been applied to the problem of enhancing radar system survival against ARM threat.